At Pentecost we were joined by Matt Levett to look at Acts 2 verses 1 to 13.
At Pentecost we were joined by Matt Levett to look at Acts 2 verses 1 to 13.
Thank you, Ben. Thank you, church, for having me back. I mean, I know you lot didn't have much choice in it, but thank you. I do really, really appreciate it. So, the day when everything changed.
Just stop and think about your life for a moment. What's the most important day that you've had that you've lived? The day when everything changed for you.
It might be the day you were born. Actually, that's pretty significant. I'm told, reliably, by Google AI, that the odds of you being born, that that sperm meeting that egg is almost incalculable. It's about one in four quadrillion. So, that's pretty spectacular, isn't it? That you're even here is probably really significant.
Maybe the day was when you passed those exams and you knew the university you were heading off to and the life that seemed to open up for you.
Maybe it was the day you fell in love and you knew everything was going to be different.
Or that marriage day where you stood in front of each other and said, I do.
Maybe it was the day you won a competition or a trophy.
Maybe it was the day you passed your driving test. We all know that feeling, right? Where, again, the world seems to open up to us.
Maybe it was the day the news wasn't quite so good. Maybe it was the day when the doctor's diagnosis came through, and we know our life is going to be different.
Or maybe it was the day, a few years after that great wedding ceremony, where the divorce decree comes through and we know our life has changed equally, but in a different way.
Maybe somebody important to us died. Whatever, those days stay in our memory, right? I want to take you back to a morning that started like any other. A group of about 120 people, they're huddled in a room in Jerusalem. They're scared. They're confused. They're hiding.
They don't know what's coming next. Their leader has been executed. Their hopes have been crushed.
They don't know what's happening to them. They're there in this room praying, probably not because they were particularly holy at that moment, but because they were desperate. Because it was habit, maybe.
They didn't know what else to do. And then nine o'clock came around and everything changed. And the Bible says this that's been read to us.
Suddenly a sound like a blowing violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
Friends, this wasn't a quiet religious service. This was holy chaos. It was wind that wasn't wind. It was fire that wasn't fire. And a group of uneducated fishermen, cretins, uneducated fishermen, former tax collectors, suddenly began speaking in languages that they never learned. This word, this news of this spirit was revolutionary.
Now, just because it was revolutionary doesn't mean it changed things easily. You see, beyond our passage for today, most of you would know this if you used to come into church, Jesus has come. He's lived his life. He's died. He's resurrected. And that resurrection has shattered Jerusalem and the Jewish faith.
There will be turmoil and uproar for 50 days. That's what Pentecost means, 50. But that turmoil and uproar of 50 days is set against hundreds and hundreds of years of Jewish history and set against thousands and thousands of Jews who've lived for centuries living out the Old Testament faith.
And even though they've seen the resurrection, there's a massive temptation for them to slip back into the way things were, slip back into the old ways, slip back into the old way of doing things and the old way of honouring God.
It's like the immovable object of Jewish tradition meets the unstoppable force of the Holy Spirit. And when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force, it is no wonder that you get a sound of wind and fire, because that's what's going to happen, right? And that's where we have this famous Acts 2 Pentecost passage.
And I'm just going to pause there for a moment from preaching, doing what preachers do, because I want to spend a few minutes sort of going into teaching mode just a little bit, if that's okay. Because some of you sitting here will be quite used to this language. You'll have read it lots of times.
You'll have heard sermons on it lots of times. You'll be used to the language of Holy Spirit, but some of you may not. You may have been coming to church for years and years and years and never heard of teaching on the Holy Spirit.
Or you might be new here today, wondering what on earth have I walked into. You might be thinking: oh, church, I can sort of get, I can sort of understand it. They're a bit weird, and you look at the person across the road. They're a bit weird, but I can cope with that.
You sing songs that you don't know the words to, to a God that you're not sure you know, but you're like, I can cope with that. Maybe even when Ben or another teacher gets up to speak and they say, we've got to live a bit like this person called Jesus.
And you're like, that's a bit weird, but I can handle that. I'm a big boy now.
But then somebody at the front starts talking about Holy Spirit and tongues of fire, and you're like, whoa, that sounds a bit too weird for me.
And there might be some of you that want to get up and leave. You're welcome to, but please don't. Hopefully in this next bit, I'll answer just a few of our questions, because you might have heard this word Holy Spirit, and you're not sure what it really means.
Who or what is the Holy Spirit? How do I get him in my life, or how do I avoid him? And then we'll jump back into the passage, and hopefully it'll make a bit more sense to us. Back from this story, back a few days, well, yeah, 50 days or so, Jesus was speaking with his disciples at a last supper, the last meal he had with them. In an extended way, he's talking with them, and he said this to them.
He said, I will ask the Father God, and he will give another advocate to help you and to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth.
Now, for those early disciples, those earlier followers of Jesus, this idea of a spirit, of a counsellor, of an advocate, this Holy Spirit, this would have been almost entirely new stuff for them.
They wouldn't have understood it just like many of us. They would have had as many questions as we do. And this word in their language, in the Greek, is a word called pneuma. And pneuma means breath or air in motion.
It's where we get the words like pneumatic from in English. And even that one word, pneuma, actually tells us a huge amount about who the Holy Spirit is. It's breath. It's air in motion. Breath and air in motion is about life, right? It's about growth. It's about progression.
The absence of breath brings death. The Holy Spirit is about bringing life and about bringing growth and about bringing purpose to us as individual believers but also as the church.
Now, the astute ones amongst you that haven't fallen asleep already will be going, Matt's using a personal pronoun. He's calling the Holy Spirit “he”. And that is really important. The Holy Spirit isn't an it. It's not like the force in Star Wars that the Jedis use. That's not the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is personal.
And there's huge significance in that. There's huge significance in believing there's a personal God behind the universe, a personal God at the heart of all we know. The deep need in all of us to be loved, to be valued, to have purpose, to have meaning, all of those are ultimately unmeetable unless there is a person who loves and values and gives purpose and meaning.
It would be really weird and odd if the instrument of God was impersonal. The Holy Spirit is personal. And when you read passages, other passages about the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, he exhibits attributes of a person. Talks about intelligence and thinking and feeling and a will.
There's a verse that says we can upset the Spirit or grieve the Holy Spirit. You can't grieve an it. You can't grieve a chair. You can only grieve a person or upset a person.
And as I said, this idea of the Spirit was really unknown to the first disciples, the first followers of Jesus. All they would have known was anything they could glean from the first five books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.
So, they're learning as they go along as well. Sometimes as Christians we think, oh, the Spirit came alive when Jesus left the earth. That's not true. The Spirit has been around since time itself began, when the Spirit of God brooded over the waters of creation in Genesis. The Old Testament speaks of the Spirit of the Lord about 100 times.
And the Old Testament word is Ruach. You have to get the spit in the back of your throat when you say that. Ruach or Ruach HaKodesh.
Again, it's a word that means wind, but it's more like the sweeping desert winds that come in and change the landscape. You know, when the desert winds sweep through and suddenly there are sand dunes where there weren't any before. That's the Old Testament Ruach.
And this Ruach was the personal agency of God in his activity. When God formed man from the dust in the ground, he breathed into him the breath of life, the Ruach breath of God. The magnificence of God's creation is found in the Spirit.
In Psalm 139 where it says “where can I go from your Spirit?” There's nowhere you can escape the Ruach breath of God coming in. So, this idea of the Spirit was known but unknown to the disciples. There was hope that there would be something more, but they didn't really know what it was.
And so when you come to the New Testament, you know, these disciples are learning as we're learning. And as I said, the New Testament word normally is this word pneuma, breath. It was the pneuma that gave power and life to Mary's womb in the Christmas story to bring forth Jesus, to bring forth life.
But sometimes there's this other word used that was used in the passage that I just shared, this Greek word paraclete. Paraclete is a difficult word to translate because it means lots of things. But it sort of means advocate, or counsellor, or helper, or somebody who fights on your behalf.
A paraclete is somebody who's got your back. A paraclete is somebody who's going to fight for you. And the primary role of the Holy Spirit is to be there for us.
Not in a selfish way, I'm going to go on to that, but in a personal way. The Holy Spirit has several roles that he wants to achieve. And the first of which is to convict us of our sin.
The work of the Holy Spirit firstly and primarily is to convict us of our sin, to come and help us understand what sin is. That's why there's that important verse that people often jump to because they're worried about that important verse in Matthew about the unforgivable sin. The primary work of the Holy Spirit is to convict us of sin.
So if you're worried about committing an unforgivable sin, don't worry, you've not committed it. You can set it aside. Because the very fact that you're worried about it means you're orientated towards sin and God.
So don't worry about that one. But the primary job of the Holy Spirit is to convict us of sin, to draw us to a knowledge of God. And once he's done that, he draws us into a relationship with him, a knowledge of him.
And he gives us the power, he gives us the faith to believe in him, and the ongoing strength to live for him. That is the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Now, of course, later on, we're going to talk about this, Paul talks about some gifts and some empowering that Holy Spirit does for the growing of the church.
But the primary work of the Holy Spirit in your life and my life is this, to convict us of sin, to draw us to a knowledge of God, to give us faith to believe in him, and then to live for him.
And against the background of that teaching that I've just given you, the passage that was read to us comes a bit clearer, right? We see the breath of God, the ruach, spirit-changing wind, and the pneuma bringing life, we see that come together in the disciples. A loud wind rushes through, tongues of fire appear on their heads, they start speaking different languages.
And some of you are sitting there going, oh, this is where I get a bit nervous. This is where the leaders of the church really pay attention. Oh, is Matt going to start talking about weird things happening? We hear some weird things happening in other churches, but not ours.
Well, the Holy Spirit comes not as a party trick. The Holy Spirit comes as a purpose. But the purpose is to help us to live for God.
And that might mean giving us some additional gifts, some additional help to help us do that. Like the disciples sitting in that upper room, they were scared, they were worried, they needed some help. And God says, it's okay, I'm with you.
There's an advocate, there's somebody who's got your back, there's a counsellor, don't worry.
Now, of course, the church as a whole, the worldwide church, has over different times, different places, different culture, different locations, worshipped the same God, but in different ways. Some of which are more focused on the Holy Spirit than others.
You can, of course, live life through a contemplative tradition. Monks and nuns and hermits and prayerful robed followers, they concentrate on solely disciplines, with the Spirit silently guiding their prayers.
Other people choose to live in a more holiness tradition, focussing on holy habits that bring them closer to God. And the same Spirit helps them with the strength to live out those holy habits.
You might choose to live your life through a social justice tradition, sort of rolling up your sleeves and saying, God wants us to be fully involved with our world, to be Jesus's hands and feet. And the Spirit, the same Spirit, will prompt and guide and give gifts to enable that to happen. Same God, but just worshipped and worked out in different ways.
It might be through an evangelical tradition. Those of us, me, who love delving into God's Word and preaching and teaching from it, committed to living it out, no matter how hard it might be. It's the Spirit that empowers that preaching and teaching and the living out. The same Spirit.
Some people from perhaps a more Eastern Orthodox or Catholic tradition live their lives in a more sacramental sense. People of Spirit meeting God through ritual and repetition.
And some people finally serve Jesus best through a charismatic Spirit-empowered life, where the Spirit as God is expressed in and through voice and gifts and power.
And just so you know, if you want to know more about those things, can I really recommend this book? Read this book, Streams of Living Water, by Richard Foster. Great author. He wrote Celebration of Discipline and whatever. And he talks about these different traditions.
And most Christians I know sort of operate a mix and a match from all of those paths, emphasising different styles at different times in their life or in the life of their church. And some of you sitting here may have come from a tradition or a church where the Holy Spirit is more emphasised than others. But every tradition, every age, every Christian has the Holy Spirit in their lives.
Just like the first Pentecostal experience, the Holy Spirit is given to every believer who becomes a Christian. When you become a Christian, the Holy Spirit comes to live inside you. Being a Christian and having the Spirit are one of the same things.
You cannot be a Christian without the Holy Spirit inside you. And I emphasise that because a lot of people get confused over that. Question, have I got the Holy Spirit? Answer, Ephesians 1 verse 13, you were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, that's the gospel of salvation. When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, a deposit guaranteeing your inheritance.
Do you notice the language? When you became a Christian, it was like a seal was put on your life, like a king with a cygnet ring putting a seal on your heart saying he, she is mine. And the king has put that seal on your life. You are his.
And that seal operates as a deposit guaranteeing what is to come, salvation that is to come. Jesus says you are mine and that includes you. I'm not looking at anyone in particular, but that includes you. Even if you feel unworthy, you're still included. Even if you don't feel the Spirit inside you, you're still included.
Now that Spirit only works for people who are saved, those who have believed. The Spirit works in and around the life of non-believers, drawing them to an understanding of who he is. But the seal, the mark that you are God's possession happens when you believe. That's like a sealing.
Now it's not a case of, oh I'm sealed, right, sit down, wait for glory. No, no, the Spirit is there to give us power to live for him.
When I choose not to give into temptation, it's not in my strength, it's in the power of the Holy Spirit. And the Spirit of God gives us natural things to enable us to live for him. In fact in this passage, they heard people speaking tongues, normal languages, reflecting maybe back to the Tower of Babel, an Old Testament story where God mixed up their languages and now what does he do? He brings the languages back into one. He restores them.
And that babbling, that language was so loud and disorientating and confusing that everyone thought people were drunk. Peter had to stand up and remind them, no, this is what was predicted.
But Paul later on says, keep on being filled with the Holy Spirit to continue a sense. Don't just think now I've got it, I don't need to worry. Keep on living with the Holy Spirit.
When we see miracles, of which I've seen some, when we see answered prayer, of which I've seen some, it's because of the power of the Holy Spirit. When we use our gifts, be they natural gifts or supernatural gifts, when we use those to help the Church, that is in the power of the Spirit.
When people pray in tongues, either human languages or spiritual languages, that's the power of the Spirit to benefit the Church.
When insights are given of words that seem strange but connect with somebody else in the congregation, that's the Spirit guiding us. When healings occur, that's through the Spirit of God.
Of course, this is a bit where we feel a bit panicky and we freak out and we think, oh, strange things are going to happen.
You might have seen TV stations where people fall down and roar like lions and whatever, but God is speaking and moving. Now, the Spirit of God is gracious. He will not force himself on anyone.
The Pentecost expression is a taster of what he offers his people. When you gather from the list all through the New Testament, you sort of come up with this list of gifts that he gives, some which are quite normal, which we understand, teaching, encouragement, we get that. Some of them are perhaps a bit more abnormal and supernatural. They're still God's gifts.
Incidentally, emphasise that, they're God's gifts. They don't belong to us. God might choose to use you in healing, great, but that doesn't mean you're a healer. It means God's the healer who happened to choose to use you.
And if we start claiming these things are ours, then we're heading the wrong path. They're God's gifts. They don't belong to us. They belong to him.
They're never for our glory. They're for building up the church. And interestingly, we're always bothered about this stuff. There's another list of things that the Spirit does, the fruit of the Spirit.
Not gifts of the Spirit, but the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness... We concentrate on the supernatural stuff.
But I will always say fruit before gifts, character before charisma, roots before branches. The outward characteristics - the fruit - is the proof of the Spirit working in every Christian. And this is a personal point of view here, but I have a lot of suspicion of those who seem to display the extraordinary supernatural gifts, but have a singular lack of the fruit in their lives.
To quote a famous passage from Paul: I can speak in the tongues of men or angels, but if I don't have love, I'm nothing. I'm just a loud, resounding gong. I could have the gift of prophecy. I could fathom all mysteries. I could be amazing. I could have faith that moves mountains. But if I don't have the fruit, then I'm nothing.
And be suspicious of those that seem to have all the gifts, but none of the fruit. I've seen miraculous things happen. I've seen all the gifts displayed. I firmly believe in the gifts of the Spirit for the church now.
But personally speaking, I don't care if you seem to have all the gifts of the Spirit. You can pray in tongues, you can roar like a lion, you can fall face down, but it's how you get up that counts.
What are you like on Monday morning when the craziness of Sunday service has finished?
If you walk into next week kinder, more gentle, more self-controlled, then praise God the Spirit was moving. But if you don't, then at best it was just human ego and at worst it's manipulation.
It's not about second-class Christians, guys. It's not about those who've got the Spirit and those that don't. Those who speak in tongues God loves a little bit more. In fact, in my experience, the more mature Christians exhibit the gifts of the Spirit without even realising it. They just listen and trust God's voice.
Most of us here, if not all of us, have never experienced the tongues of fire on our heads or the Ruach breath of God sweeping through. But maybe we've experienced the hints, the nudges, the little gut that won't go away, where we think, I need to say this or I need to do this.
And as we trust that prompting of the Holy Spirit, it becomes clearer in our life. I'm going to finish in the next two minutes, but just one more aspect for us to finish, which I think is really important.
At the Last Supper, when Jesus promises the disciples these things, he says one more really important thing. He says, yeah, if you love me, keep my commands. I will ask the Father. He will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever, the Spirit of truth.
But then verse 18, I will not leave you as orphans. That was the thing they were most scared about - Jesus is going and we're going to be left on our own. But God says, I won't leave you. I won't leave you as an orphan.
And at some point, each and every one of us in this room need to hear those words. Perhaps our greatest fear and challenge is abandonment and isolation and loneliness and vulnerability. These words remind us that we are not destined to walk this earth without identity or direction.
We do not stand alone. Jesus says, I will not leave you as orphans.
And when those significant moments of life come, good or bad, transition and changes and tragedies, that might want to leave us as an orphan, God says, no. I will not leave you as orphans. That's the promise.
On earth, Jesus was limited as all humans are. He couldn't be in all places at all times. He could not be present with you and me here and somebody else over there.
And that's why he left his spirit to be with us so that none of us would be orphans. The promised Holy Spirit is with each of us, enabling God to be with us and enabling us to be the church. I'm gonna close just there.
I'm gonna ask the worship team to come up, but we're gonna do something that's perhaps just a little bit different from your norm. Again, feel free to be who you want to be. You might say, I'm gonna sit for the next 10 minutes with my eyes closed, pretending that I'm praying to God, but really I'm falling asleep.
That's okay. That's okay. But we're gonna have just a bit of space and a bit of time to say, God, do you want to do something in this place at this time? You might want to sit there and in your head pray, God, fill me with your spirit.
God, I've sort of pushed your spirit aside and maybe you've deliberately distanced the spirit because it feels a bit weird and you're saying, no, God, I'm gonna hold out my hands to you and ask him to fill you. Maybe there's a challenge in your life or a challenge in the week ahead where you need God's power to help you. Use this time to pray into that.
Maybe if you're self-aware, you might go, there's a fruit of the spirit that I'm lacking. I need to be more kind or more gentle or more self-controlled and use this time to pray that God's spirit will give you the fruit.
Maybe you want to hold out your hands. Not that that's magic, but it's a sort of a sign to God saying, I'm ready.
It might also be a time not just to receive, but a time to give. Maybe as you're sitting there, a picture comes into your mind and you might think, where did that come from?
Maybe a person comes into your mind and you think that picture could be for that person. It feels weird because you don't know what the picture might mean, but maybe the biggest thing the spirit's gonna do in you is to enable you to get up and walk across the room and sit next to somebody you don't know and say, look, God wants me to pray for you.
In my experience, I've never had a blinding certainty from God, but just this uncomfortable, maybe I need to say this to that person. Maybe you've even got a word for the whole church. That's okay too, but we want just a little bit of order in this time rather than 20 people shouting out words for the church.
If you think there's something that might be for the church, maybe you just want to come up the front and chat to Stu or to Matt here and just say, I think this might be for the church and enable them to sort of sift it and help it through. It might be for now.
It might be for later, and they want to share it in another service. So let's just spend 15 minutes just singing together if you want, listening to the worship, praying to God, and let's just see what he might do. And I'm gonna pray.
Father God, we thank you for your spirit. Thank you for what you've done in our lives through him already, most of which we failed to recognise or thank you for. But we thank you for him.
Thank you that he brought us to know you. He convicted us of our sin and helped us to meet with you. And Lord, I pray now for these next few minutes, may your spirit move amongst your people.
May your spirit touch gently and perhaps boldly. May your spirit speak to your people and your church here now. In your name, Father. Amen.